© 2006

She felt sick all the time now, and it was guilt making her feel that way. The guilt had spread like malignant cells throughout her body. Now it squeezed her neck until she choked, and couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t speak truthfully. She didn’t want to live like this, and she couldn’t anymore. She would rather die. She felt she was dying anyway.

In the shower, a glassed-in space with a glass tile floor that hovered gorgeous as a transparent butterfly over dark Topanga Canyon, Leigh Jackson scrubbed away the sweat of her day’s labor. Brushing a stiff loofah over her arms, she realized the pointlessness of worrying about what came next. She had to confess, outcomes be damned.

Although tonight could ruin her life, and his.

Correction: it could ruin her life more than it was already ruined.

She heard him sawing downstairs. Her husband, Ray, had followed his latest routine tonight, the routine that made her crazy, made her act out, forced her to-

No. Unfair to blame him.

By the time she had come home, he had already eaten and disappeared into his dungeon workshop downstairs. He loved it; she hated the space, finding it as claustrophobic and as hard as an animal’s cave. She had never told Ray that, although he must know. He used to know her so well. He used to study her smile and the slight wrinkles around her eyes that had suddenly appeared when she reached thirty a few years before. He used to touch them almost-reverently.

Well, that had stopped.

Culpability. Not all hers. Not entirely unfair to allow that he played a role in her unforgivable behavior. Once locked together as tightly as barnacles on a rock, they had pulled apart. The parting cracked things: shells, muscle, tissue, heart.

Wounded when he didn’t touch her anymore, unable to pierce the dark hood over eyes that had once looked at her so openly, for some time now she had pondered what had triggered his withdrawal. To her surprise, she traced the changes to when his architectural firm began to get truly successful. Newspapers covered their projects. The latest article featured her handsome husband, looking somewhat bewildered at the attention, with a foot up on a concrete pediment in front of a gigantic new structure.

He had become the public’s toast, any crazy design idea accepted, no, even celebrated by the press. Jobs poured in.

“We’ve got a cushion now. I could take some time off, have a baby,” she had said happily a few weeks before, reading the story with the color photo in the morning paper.

He hadn’t said anything, but it was right after that he started in on the infernal model-building.

She plucked a towel off the brushed-nickel rack and started on her hair. Ray had designed this house, right down to the metal plate behind the toilet paper roll that you could tilt out to hide things behind. How they had laughed about that, holding hands and poring over the plans. “My mother always had hiding places in the houses we lived in, so I guess I always expected every house to have one. I’ll buy you diamonds to hide in there,” he had said, taking her calloused hands in his. “You’d like a big fat diamond, wouldn’t you?” He twirled her hair between his fingers as they kissed.

She told him, Make it a diamond-headed saw. That, she could use. Still madly in love, she let him have his way with her anytime he wanted, along with letting him have his way with the design of the house he called their dream.

Only later did she realize what that cost her. She felt uncomfortable, out of place in her own home, preferring curvy organic forms like the furniture she designed and built in her business.

So she didn’t care about diamonds, but she always thought they would have a child, half of each of them. She didn’t understand people not having kids. In her view, if a plan existed for human beings, it was to reproduce and raise a flock of terrific new human beings. She didn’t intend to drop the subject.

The next time she broached the topic of getting pregnant, she picked a moment she thought propitious, her on top, him enjoying her body the way he always did. They had eaten a lovely meal, cooked by her. She had changed from her usual working togs after work to look pretty for him, and she could see by the appreciation in his eyes, he liked the silvery sandals and short black dress, and had, even more, enjoyed removing them.

They lay together in candlelight and she, warmed by the moment and the caresses she could still feel on her naked skin, said, “I love you. Now, let’s do it again. Make me pregnant, Ray.”

He pushed her off and pulled on his jeans. “It’s not a good time for me.”

But time was starting to work against her. A thirty-five-year-old woman had to consider such things. She tried to raise the issue several more times, but each time agitated him more until finally he refused to discuss it.

In her contemporary-as-hell bathroom, sticking dangling purple earrings into the holes in her ears, Leigh allowed herself a few moments to mourn. She might never have a child after all, not with Ray anyway, and this thought reminded her of other people she had lost through death or distance.

Tom and his sister, Kat Tinsley.

Brushing a little powder over her shiny nose, she wished she hadn’t run from Kat, who had been her closest friend once. They hadn’t seen each other in years. Every time she went to Tom’s grave, she expected to run into her. In the six years since he died, she never had.

Ray used to like the smell of gardenias, like the ones she had carried in her wedding bouquet, so she pulled out some cologne he had given her in more sensitive times and squirted herself liberally. Who knew whether she might gain a subtle, unconscious advantage? As she selected a cool cotton blouse and knotted it above her navel because she still could get away with that, just barely, because her work was often physical and kept her in good shape, she could not stop a fleeting memory of his arms around her, how good they used to feel, how safe.

She didn’t feel safe anymore. Ray, her Ray, had gone away, to be replaced by a man she didn’t know and could no longer predict, subject to fits of temperament, fits of temper, in fact. When she arrived late to a restaurant date the previous week, he had already gone home. He bolted the front door from the inside. He made her wait outside the exact amount of time she had been late, as he explained later, as if somehow that made his reaction entirely sane.

She yanked on her favorite purple T-shirt and fresh shorts, gave her hair a shake, and walked barefoot into the stainless-steel kitchen, punching at cabinets that had no handles because they might ruin the “line.” Frustrated even more than usual, she finally opened the wine cooler with a good hard kick. She pulled out a bottle of something red, uncorked it, and poured two glasses, setting them on the table in front of the couch, then called to him, “I’m coming down. You need anything from up here?”

“No.”

She felt afraid but would tell him, whatever it cost her tonight. Whatever their problems, he deserved an honest wife. How could they ever love each other again without that much?

She used to love sneaking up behind him, enveloping him in her arms, feeling how his heart and breathing steadied as he relaxed against her body. Now, she didn’t dare surprise him because, well, who knew? Considering that strange tantrum last week, he might even strike out at her.